Marking its 30th anniversary this year, the Interop conference and expo is returning to its roots with a renewed focus on networking, according to Interop vice president and general manager Jennifer Jessup.

The conference is scheduled to kick off Monday at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, and will run from May 2-6. The expo, meanwhile, will be open May 4-5.

After a post-2008 shift away from networking to a greater focus on business technology in general, Interop this year "pledges to embrace the network and the technologies that feed off of it," Jessup wrote in an online note to attendees. The return to a networking focus is being driven by several major trends, including the rise of cloud computing and the Internet of Things, she said.

Exhibitors Include Cisco, IBM, VMware

Following the 2007-2008 economic meltdown, networking for a time "stood for the particularly unsexy switches and routers that have been commoditized since the mid-2000s," Jessup said. With the rise of software-defined networking, however, the concept today is "cool" and "essential," she added.

Among the keynote speakers at this year's Las Vegas Interop are Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Cathy Polinsky, vice president of engineering for search at Salesforce; Jeff Reed, senior vice president for enterprise infrastructure and solutions at Cisco; and Amin Vahdat, networking technical lead at Google and a Google Fellow.

Throughout the five-day conference, sessions and talks will focus on several different tracks, including applications, security, wireless and mobility, and virtualization and data center. The two-day expo will feature exhibits by Cisco, Cox Business, Cylance, Dell, IBM, Netgear, Spirent Communications and VMware, among others.

Next Big Thing: IoT

A number of special events and exhibit areas are also planned for this year's Interop. Startup companies, for instance, will be featured in a new Startup City area at the expo. Representatives from four startups will participate in "Startup Hot Seat" sessions where they will each have eight minutes to describe their offerings to an expert panel.

At the expo on Wednesday and Thursday, an InteropNet Demo Lab team will give live demonstrations of middleware, interoperability and standardization technologies for the enterprise Internet of Things. Winners from a field of 30 recently named finalists will also be announced in several categories for the 2016 Best of Interop Awards.

Two days of Interop Summits are planned for Monday and Tuesday to provide attendees with information about the potential for developing technologies in networking, containers, cybersecurity, DevOps and other areas. On the same days, Interop will also host an Elite 100 Conference, as a co-located event at the Four Seasons.

"Internet of Things is the next market set to explode -- IoT becomes a reality only through the network of data between devices, sensors and systems," Jessup said in her Interop note. "[The] bottom line is networking now requires new skills and new technologies. Interop can be poised to grab the market resurgence."

Interop Exhibitor List

Wondering who will be exhibiting at Interop and where to find them? We've got the A-Z list of exhibitors and booth numbers right here: